Voice controlled systems have been available and in use for many years. These systems, which typically incorporate a combination of computer hardware and software resident on the controlled device, allow an end-user to control a device by recitation of oral commands. The oral commands are then converted into executable commands, which can control the electronic device. Today, the voice recognition systems that drive voice controlled devices can be found in various types of technology ranging from computer interfaces, automobiles, cellular telephones and other hand held devices.
Wireless communication devices particularly lend themselves to voice control. These wireless devices typically combine cellular telephones, electronic mail, contact lists, calendaring, Internet web browsing, multimedia players and many other similar electronic applications into a single electronic package that is small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. Interaction with wireless devices is usually via a small keyboard attached to the wireless device. Since the keyboard is considerably smaller than a standard keyboard, mistakes are common and can be disruptive. Moreover, the typical use of these devices, such as while driving, makes it impractical to monitor the device and enter commands manually. Ultimately, these problems discourage the use of the device for its intended purposes. Thus, it is desirable to be able to control a wireless device using voice control rather than a keyboard.
Current wireless communication devices depend upon programming that resides entirely on the device. The capabilities of these systems is greatly restricted by the reduced memory and computing power that is generally available on mobile voice-controlled devices. However, the accuracy of speech recognition is poor in quality mostly because of environmental challenges that face mobile users such as, background noise, user linguistical-accents and cost-effective hardware such as a microphone that provides less than high quality audio.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,027,987 (“the '987 patent) discloses a method of voice interfacing to a search engine. However, as the inventors of the '987 patent report in their paper, experimentation resulted in correct recognition of spoken words only 60% of the time, see, Alex Franz and Brian Milch. Searching the Web by Voice, Proc. 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 1213-1217 (2002).
Accordingly, it is desired to have a voice controlled wireless communications device that can execute various applications while maintaining a very high accuracy of recognition of spoken words.